Psychological Safety is Essential to Business Agility

It may seem like an oxymoron to talk about psychological safety in the context of business agility, change, uncertainty, and complex situations. Yet it is essential we feel safe so we are willing and able to take risks. Psychological safety is physiological: our sense of safety is determined by our nervous systems, and our nervous systems determine whether our bodies and minds are engaged effectively.

Business agility is a collaborative culture of creating breakthroughs and transformation: exploring to understand, experimenting to learn, and exploiting to capture value. Being agile is risky for individuals and the organization. We can feel we are at-risk, or we can feel like we are in it together.

To create the conditions so people are willing and able to take risks, is the process of creating a culture of psychological safety. To foster such a culture, we need to understand how and why psychological safety matters, and what we can do to increase it.

Table of Contents

1. Psychological Safety Makes it Safe to Take Risks
2. Psychological Safety Is Physiological
3. We Can Foster Psychological Safety and Greater Team Effectiveness
4. Conclusion

Psychological Safety Makes it Safe to Take Risks

The constant missteps, mistakes, and failures required to break through the status quo and transform our organizations – and ourselves – can create many psychological threats. We can feel our roles, knowledge, expertise, status, beliefs, identities are all at-risk. If we feel threatened and unprotected, we will not engage. If we don’t believe we can trust our teams, we will not take risks. If we believe that any mistakes will be punished, we will be defensive.

Our environment and our context can be challenging, but our sense of connection with the people around us influences whether we are willing and able to take risks.

Therefore, our goal as a leader is to define clear, fair, and transparent processes (with relevant resources) so there is a shared belief among team members that it is safe – and desirable – to take interpersonal risks. Fairness and transparency means that all team members can predict with relative accuracy how and why decisions are made, what repercussions are for mistakes, and how each person will be supported in recovering from mistakes or failures.

Psychological safety reflects the most important aspect of leadership: ethics, curiosity, learning and growth, collaboration, connection, and belonging.

Psychological Safety Addresses Relationships

Just to be clear, psychological safety is not to increase comfort, not a job guarantee, nor the elimination of challenges. Business agility includes discomfort (breakthroughs and transformation are never comfortable), can result in loss, and embraces challenges in a wise way.

Psychological safety is also not motivational. Hertzberg’s motivation theory explains hygiene factors are necessary so people can engage appropriately in their work, while motivational factors to create something meaningful. Psychological safety is a ‘hygiene factor’: it is essential but insufficient to foster business agility.

Each person must engage actively to collaboratively create breakthroughs, innovation, and transformation. Psychological safety creates the conditions so teams can collaboratively take on greater challenges more effectively.

Psychological Safety Is Physiological

Our responses to perceived threats are physiological responses. Our bodies react to perceived psychological threats in the same way we respond to perceived physical threats. Cognitively we might know the difference, but our survival instincts don’t.

How Our Bodies Respond to Perceived Safety or Threat

When we do not feel safe (physically or psychologically), our nervous system goes on alert, and it may shift into threat response to ensure our survival. Business agility requires an activated nervous system, but not a threatened nervous system.

Our responses to perceived threats are mostly generated from our sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. The vagus nerve is a critical part of the parasympathetic (calming) nervous system. The vagus nerve is actually a complex system that connects our brain with many of our organs, including our heart and gut – each complex systems on its own.

As an aside, based on neuroscience advances, there are researchers who now believe our ‘heart-brains’ and ‘gut-brains’ are as powerful – and in some cases more powerful – as our ‘head-brain’.

Back to the vagus nerve and threat responses. Stephen Porges’ Polyvagal Theory recognized our threat responses are much more staged and nuanced than originally thought. It shows:

1.     The ‘smart’, ventral part of our vagus nerve generates the first response to a perceived threat: a social response. We look for other people to help us or to work with (eg collaboration). The smart-vagus influences our ability to form and maintain social bonds as it influences the signals we send (facial expressions, voice quality, heart and breath rate, etc) as well as our ability to perceive safety in others based on the signals they are sending.

2.     If a social response doesn’t relieve the sense of threat, our sympathetic nervous system triggers the fight-or-flight response.

3.     If we cannot outfight or outrun our perceived threat, our ‘primal’, dorsal vagus nerve takes control and we go into a freeze state, we become immobilized.

4.     To return to a normal state after a perceived threat, we need to relax the sympathetic system and discharge the body chemicals and hormones that built up. This can be done through safe social contact (stimulating the ‘smart’ vagus) and/or with appropriate movement.

Threat Responses Generate Different Behaviors

In the wild, the threat response is pretty obvious. For example, if a deer senses a threat, if it can’t find its herd, it starts running. If it is caught by the predator, it may freeze and become immobilized, appearing dead. But if its nervous system senses an opportunity to escape, it may ‘spring back to life’ and get away to live another day.

In a professional setting, the threat response and survival modes is a little more subtle.

• The ideal response to external challenges is a constructive social response that is cooperative, or even better, collaborative (the ‘smart’ vagus).
• Defensive social responses can look like gossip or cliquey/exclusionary behavior which can undermine breakthroughs, innovation, and transformation.
• Fight or aggressive responses can be self-sabotaging if aimed at the wrong people. And they can be weaponized against the team’s or organization’s perceived prey or predators (eg the ‘hunter salesperson’, the ‘driven’ leader, or the aggressive negotiator).
• Flight can look like frequent distractions or escapism (eg excessive fantasy images of tropical beaches or far-away places, excessive social media use, excessive use of vices ranging from frequent vaping/smoking breaks, intoxicants, illicit behavior, etc).
• Freeze looks like a robot. A ‘frozen’ person shows up more or less on time, performs their duties appropriately but with no real joy or interest in the purpose or the outcome. There is a transactional relationship between performing the checklist of duties in exchange for paychecks.

The Problem with Threat Responses

When our bodies are in survival mode, our abilities change in a way that helps us survive, but not thrive.

• Our perception narrows to focus on the perceived threat.
• Our brains and nervous system miss information, such as clues and signals that might signal solutions.
• We miss opportunities to solve problems, to form alliances or cooperate or collaborate, and to be strategic.
• We are more likely to use aggressive, defensive, or passive-aggressive tactics, which can worsen the situation we are in, and reduce or eliminate our ability to create valuable innovation or constructive, sustainable change.

When we are in survival mode, all our beneficial mindsets shut down (eg holistic-, entrepreneurial-, growth-, and collaborative-mindsets) and we are at greater risk of trying to ‘survive’ at any cost, regardless of what is wise, ethical, moral, legal, etc.

The goal in stressful situations is to keep our ‘smart’ vagus nerve in charge so we can engage in collaborative exploration, experimentation, and exploitation.

We Can Foster Psychological Safety and Greater Team Effectiveness

Our mindsets and competencies determine our individual ability to engage in business agility: collaborative exploring, experimenting, and exploiting. Psychological safety is the collective ability to stay in socially constructive responses in this challenging (and fun) process.

When the team culture includes psychological safety, sustainable performance can be increased. However, research shows the reverse is not true; performance does not result in improved culture or increased psychological safety. A culture of psychological safety must be intentionally fostered for breakthrough innovation and transformation.

At an individual level, we need to intentionally foster entrepreneurial, holistic, collaborative, and growth mindsets, and entrepreneurial competencies so we are able and willing to engage in creative conflict, the process of really challenging the status quo, perspectives, beliefs, assumptions, etc for the purpose of understanding the problem better, and creating better solutions.

At a collective level, we need to engage people, and use a range of analysis, questioning, mapping, and graduated creative conflict to really understand the dynamics of the environment, and identify real issues rather than only symptoms.

Creative conflict, change, and transformation can be very stressful. However, rather than only ‘managing’ emotions, we can leverage them if we develop our individual body wisdom, resilience, compassion, and ability to let go. To be willing and able to create breakthrough exploration, experimentation, and exploitation, we need to embrace being human.

Conclusion

Psychological safety is fundamental to business agility in uncertain, complex environments because it results in more proactive individuals, a stronger collective commitment to team success, and more productive and customer-oriented teams. 

Business agility is risky as it depends on our abilities to transform ourselves and our organizations through collaborative exploring, experimenting, and exploiting. Leaders and teams need to intentionally foster psychological safety at the individual and collective levels, so that each person is willing and able – physically and cognitively – to take relevant risks.

A culture of psychological safety significantly increases the likelihood of developing valuable and sustainable growth.

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How have you fostered psychological safety with your teams? How do you leverage the power of your physiology?

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Breaking through unseen barriers at the individual and organizational levels to improve sustainable performance can be accelerated by working with someone who knows how to create these breakthroughs. Please connect with me to explore how I might be able to help you generate your sustainable competitive advantage so you can create your breakthrough results.

Catarina von Maydell, MBA, works with leaders, individuals, and teams to facilitate sustainable breakthrough performance improvement and growth.

Other articles you might be interested in:

Mindsets:

• Entrepreneurial, Growth, Holistic, and Collaborative  Mindsets

Collaborative & Entrepreneurial Competencies:

• Effectuation, Creative Conflict,  Graduated Creative-Conflict, Creating Collaboration, and the Creator-Coach-Challenger Paradigm

Personal Super-Powers:

• Body Wisdom, Mitigating Bias, and Generating Better Solutions

Leading Change and Transformation:

• Project Management Best Practices, Understanding Our Systems, Thinking Beyond Simple Metrics, and Deming’s 4 Factors of Change 
• Business Agility is About Humans, Human Dynamics in Organizations, 3-Levels of Leadership, Motivating Humans, Fostering Collaboration, Leadership and Resilience, and Psychological Safety

#innovation #innovationleadership #changeculture #empowerment